Just a little post that I think should help clear up some of the direction we’re going with modularization of base-game content. I believe this is the opinion shared by most of the other main devs, if any of you have differing opinions feel free to chime in.
Now I’ve seen a lot of stuff about moving things out to mods, but I’d like to make an important distinction here, we are not for the most part, planning to move base game content out to mods for the most part. Rather most of this will need to wait until the next iteration of the mod manager, which should allow for finer grained control over game content (such as the removal of things). This is not to say that some content won’t be exported, some things that are less realistic or exceptionally special (such as the dead-rising esque heat blades, or all the medieval stuff). That will most likely be exported to mod packs.
What will not be done is to split all of the current base content out into mods in the current system. The current system is just not fined grained enough to allow for changes like that, and personally if you have problems with a very small amount of items then it’s not really worth the trouble it would take to export it to a mod when you can literally remove it from the JSON files yourself with a few clicks.
From what I gather, it seems to be themed stuff people are most interested in having modularized (medieval, sci-fi and dead-rising esque items) and this addresses it well. I doubt many people are wanting (I could be wrong) anything more finely grained than that at the moment.
One thing I would like to ask though is if enemies can be separated into these packs? Obviously Z’s need to stay, but is it possible to partition off Triffids/Ants/Nether/ect?
In general though, I’d really like to add my support to this way of going about things. It’s going to cut down on a lot of aggro of if people feel it’s going in the right direction or not, and more importantly allows people to have the sandbox survival they desire.
I don’t want silly flame swords or unrealistic weapons, I also don’t want a lot of these RivTech weapons and ammo because I can never find ammo for them, and the medevil swords and armor and shit.
I just want to be able to cut out those things without core file editing. This would be perfect.
[quote=“gtaguy, post:3, topic:4968”]I don’t want silly flame swords or unrealistic weapons, I also don’t want a lot of these RivTech weapons and ammo because I can never find ammo for them, and the medevil swords and armor and shit.
I just want to be able to cut out those things without core file editing. This would be perfect.[/quote]
If you would have any skill whatsoever in programming, you would just need ctrl-f and search the item’s name, and remove them from the spawn list and item jsons…
One problem with modularizing game content is that it fuckes up current save games. Aka, normal world in 0.9 (with triffids, strange weapons etc) upgrade to 0.A, boom, no more content.
Don’t know if anybody thought about that problem already. Ideally you want to be able to change the settings of generated world during play.
[quote=“Zaweri Runewright, post:5, topic:4968”][quote=“gtaguy, post:3, topic:4968”]I don’t want silly flame swords or unrealistic weapons, I also don’t want a lot of these RivTech weapons and ammo because I can never find ammo for them, and the medevil swords and armor and shit.
I just want to be able to cut out those things without core file editing. This would be perfect.[/quote]
If you would have any skill whatsoever in programming, you would just need ctrl-f and search the item’s name, and remove them from the spawn list and item jsons…[/quote]
So?
An easier way to remove unwanted things sounds like nothing but a good thing to me.
[quote=“Soyweiser, post:6, topic:4968”]One problem with modularizing game content is that it fuckes up current save games. Aka, normal world in 0.9 (with triffids, strange weapons etc) upgrade to 0.A, boom, no more content.
Don’t know if anybody thought about that problem already. Ideally you want to be able to change the settings of generated world during play.[/quote]
This has been considered already and apparently this shouldn’t effect old saves. Even if it does, it’s a small price to pay for such a giant step up in flexibility/sandboxing really.
You don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want too, and I’m sure a bit of testing from others (or yourself with a copied file) will soon sort out whether it works properly or not.
I just really don’t get people arguing against it. Like I literally cannot comprehend why anyone would want others to stop having more freedom of gameplay. It just doesn’t make sense.
I don’t think anyone here was arguing against it, just bringing up some issues that ought to be considered, and mentioning that what everyone currently expects from the mod manager might be a couple iterations away. If those issues have been already considered, that’s all well and good.
I meant more in general/on Github - I wasn’t very clear about that. To me it looks ready to go, I can’t see any problems in it now that the default flag has been fixed.
Some people are playing the game and reporting bugs using the latest experimental or their own builds. Some people are using the same save a long time. I’m not against it (why you keep thinking that is a mystery).
It is a rather massive thing to just fuck over peoples games like that. I’m just wondering if it has been considered. (Apparently it has) and what the consensus about it was.
While I am not a coder, and thus cannot weigh in on the ease/efficacious use of time in managing content (as opposed to core engine and gameplay modifications like AI, Z-levels, multi-tile monsters, ect.)
I must say that it really doesn’t upset me in the least to lose a save due to version advancement. I expect any game with constant content tweaks, updates and releases to easily obliterate my character/world every time the numbers change (big or small.)
Yeah, I mean this game is a 0.x game and by definition they’re unstable - if you want to carry on with no risk to your world, then it’s fine to just keep playing the same version, no one makes you upgrade.
Regardless, It has been thought, and the consensus was that it should not cause any problems (as everything is generated at world gen (sort of)).
Also, I wasn’t saying it was you that was against it, I just meant in general -sorry for confusion
That is allright. Sorry if I took it all to personal.
I think it will cause problems (but I have only anecdotal evidence for it). As a game I was playing (same safe for some time, but did upgrade the content). Had new stuff spawn in houses. Stuff that I think (not 100% sure) was not there on creation of the world.
(Bottles of saline I think. I suddenly noticed a yellow book in my pile of books that I had read already).
I could be mistaken of course. It happens. Rarely.
For now, most of the discussion is focusing on moving stuff into mods, but once this first part is done, I imagine the main use of mods will be to add content easily without having to merge it into the main game, which should be a much less contentious affair.
It makes it possible to blacklist items, which I assume was the main reason for dissatisfaction?[/quote]
Whilst I agree that looks like a great addition, I don’t think that it makes the modules obsolete. It basically allows for fine tuning of things that you don’t want in (say if you didn’t want rocks in your game, as is the example), but having thematic mod packs is much, much more convenient and allows users to just toggle on and off the items they want.
Splitting things out into mods provides a very coarse category system that lets people enable/disable certain kinds of things. It also drives regrouping content into logical chunks, which is also a good thing. The downside of a straight blacklist system is you have to go through and toggle a bunch of things individually, the downside of a category enable/disable system is that it doesn’t allow exceptions.
We need both
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:19, topic:4968”]Splitting things out into mods provides a very coarse category system that lets people enable/disable certain kinds of things. It also drives regrouping content into logical chunks, which is also a good thing. The downside of a straight blacklist system is you have to go through and toggle a bunch of things individually, the downside of a category enable/disable system is that it doesn’t allow exceptions.
We need both :)[/quote]
Editable blacklist categories that are safe to transfer between games? Jsons? waggles eyebrows
